New IAM focuses on Bessen and Meurer’s Patent Failure

The new issue of IAM is now available on-line to the magazine’s subscribers. The cover story focuses on Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. Written by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, the book has attracted a great deal of attention across the world because of its central message; namely, that the US patent system is failing to incentivise innovation and, in fact, is actually acting as a disincentive to the inventive process.

There are many reasons for those with vested interests in patents to be concerned. The India press has just gone on the offense as well, criticising the very notion of software patentability. It’s part of an ongoing revolt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11] in which Microsoft is involved too (it files applications for software patents over there, even though it’s against the law).

Living up to its status as the country’s Information Technology (IT) capital, Bangalore played host to a different kind of “software lobby” here on Saturday.

Unlike most lobbies, this one had no vested interests and no hard-line agenda. In a bid to raise awareness about software patenting and generate a debate among stakeholders, the Free Software community from across the country participated in a national-level meeting against software patents.

But so far everyone is still trying to reform individual egoism failed, criticized the EU representative Jens Gaster: “We have the egoism of national patent and trademark offices. About half of the patent and trademark offices have too little money and too little work. We have the interests of the European Patent Office and European Patent Organization, which wants to remain autonomous.

Can the EPO ever stand for quality again? Or will it see its status further exacerbated at the hands of the McCreevies of the world [1, 2]? █

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Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations